11 FREE “Action” online games for PC

Doom

Thanks to its shareware past, the entirety of the first (and best) episode of the first Doom is playable in your browser. I shouldn’t need to give you a rundown of what to expect here: it’s Doom. There are demons, doors, switches and keycards, all placed around a sprawling Mars base full of corridors and secrets. The only downside to this browser-based resurrection is that it doesn’t support mouse-look, so, on top of a quality FPS, you’re also getting a history lesson in how cumbersome shooter controls could be.

SuperHot

The Seven Day FPS competition was created to keep first person shooting interesting. Entrants were given a week to create eccentric, experimental, and high-concept ideas, without a theme to restrict them. It was the perfect breeding ground for a game like SuperHot, which took the tired FPS cliche of Bullet Time and, through a simple twist on the formula, created something completely new. To quote the game’s opening, “it’s about time”.

The elevator pitch is equally pithy: time moves when you do. Stand still and the scene freezes. Walk, strafe or aim, and it starts back up. Instantly it transforms the focus of the men-shooting genre. Playing SuperHot isn’t about reflex and reaction, it’s about precision and choreography. It’s these same principles that underpin every action film, but that games frequently miss in the panicked throes of real-time firefights. It’s short but, thanks to Kickstarter, a full, commercial release is also being worked on.

Dojo of Death

A dojo seems like an eminently sensible place for fighting to break out, although it must be hell getting all that blood out of those nice wooden floors. Dojo of Death, then. It’s a one-button, entirely mouse-driven little timewaster about a guy fond of chopping people to bits. Not a butcher, no, but a hyper-quick ninja beset from all sides by enemies. Click in the direction you happen to be pointing at to dart forward with your sword drawn and slash any baddie ninjas into ninja ham. Occasionally baddie bow-wielding ninjas emerge from the adjoining room, who can turn you into fine paste from far away. Dojo of Death is endless, and tough, and like many of the best endless-tough games, your first instinct on death will be to retry. And retry. And retry again. It’s unlikely you’ll remember it a week from now, but at least it kept you from finishing that super-important spreadsheet—and that’s really all you could ever want from a browser game.

The Last Tango

The winner of the New Mexico Game Jam, The Last Tango is a game about rhythm espionage survival. I’d have called it Dance Dance Execution, but the principle remains the same. You play as two spies, dancing through a variety of deadly locations. They’ll pirouette past traps, dodge under attacks, and take down enemies with an elegant twirl. And a gun.

Each move is performed to the beat, so as the levels get more complicated, you’ll queue up actions and watch as they’re gracefully executed. Step right, shoot left, step left, spin, shoot up and to the right, get decapitated by a ninja. As the dance becomes increasingly hazardous, timing and order become essential for success.

Rhythm Doctor

Part of this year’s IGF Student Showcase, Rhythm Doctor takes the style and irreverence of rhythm games, but features a much stricter margin of error. Your job—as a trainee doctor for the NHS—is to hit a button on every seventh beat of a patient’s heart rate monitor. That button press will only register if it’s within 0.02 seconds of the target, so precision is key.

Each patient introduces a different quirk to the rhythmic counting. Certain beats may be silent, forcing you to keep your own time. Other times, multiple blips will appear. To further complicate matters, some patients contain boss viruses. An early one distorts your connection to the monitor, forcing you to keep perfect time as the music warps, skips and rewinds.

SoundDodger

In rhythm games, the music is both your adversary and your reward. That principle is taken to the extreme in Soundodger, where the notes fire a wave of spikes towards your cursor. Get hit and the music distorts—skipping forward a few seconds like a speeding record. You lose points for this, which is a shame, but the greater punishment is destroying the excellent soundtrack, featuring songs from composers like Disasterpeace and Lifeformed. If you like the free game, an expanded version is available on Steam .

Brawlin’ Sailor

Major Bueno are back! Brawlin’ Sailor is another beautiful/hilarious short story of a game, this time traversing into sidescrolling beat-’em-up territory. There’s no challenge to the combat; you’re playing for the story, which takes about five glorious minutes to see through.

Silhouette

Like a number of free horror games, Silhouette doesn’t rely on high-tech visuals to generate its scares. It’s a two-player killer vs. victim game set in a dark house. Control shifts between the knife-wielding killer and their unarmed victim, allowing for turns of real-time movement that shorten as the killer and the victim draw closer together. The increasingly fraught pacing does a great job of inspiring mounting panic in both players, toying with the same manipulative patterns seen across horror cinema, from the Jaws soundtrack to the murder famous murder scenes of Psycho. An effective horror experiment that’s worth a go if you can get a couple of horror fans around your keyboard.

My Friend Pedro

My Friend Pedro provides a compelling case for why you shouldn’t follow the advice of a talking banana. It’s a 2D action platformer with a heavy debt to Max Payne—although mercifully, this hallucinating protagonist is less prone to questioning his worth as a human being. Instead, he leaps, flip and rolls about each level, using his slow-mo ability to avoid bullets and unload an unnervingly accurate volley of return fire. It’s a short game, but one packed full of opportunities to show off your balletic bullet time skills.

Ratz Instagib

Ratz Instagib is a browser-based mulitplayer shooter that distills the pinpoint aiming and unlikely acrobatics of Quake and Unreal Tournament into their purest, simplest form. There is one weapon in the game: a railgun of unlimited range that kills anything in one hit. Also you’re all rats for some reason.

The setup means that everyone meets on an even playing field. The only guarantee of success is to be better at hitting a small and speedy target than that target is at hitting you. In a map full of FPS experts, lives can last for seconds as you desperately cull as many players as possible before a laser pierces your tiny frame.

Pale Machine

A “playable music video” from Ben Esposito, one of the Arcane Kids, and musician bo en. Interaction in these happy few minutes is limited to tilting objects with the arrow keys or stretching your fingers—well, stretching somebody’s fingers—with the keyboard, but it’s just enough to make you feel part of this bouncy, brightly coloured world.